I used to think a field was only a field if it was working for you. Grass for cattle, hay for winter, a ditch to keep the wind off, a gate to keep strangers out. My father had the same belief, and his father before him. We farmed a small stretch of land near the edge of North County Dublin, not far from the road people take when they are leaving the city behind and pretending they are already in the countryside. You could still see the glow of Dublin on wet evenings, a soft orange over the hedges, but in the yard it was just mud, crows, diesel, and the low sound of animals breathing.
After my wife, Nuala, died, the place became too quiet. That sounds strange because a farm is never really quiet. There is always a trough filling, a dog barking, a tractor ticking after it has been switched off. But the kind of quiet I mean was in the house. Her coat stayed on the hook. Her mug stayed at the back of the press. I would come in from checking the calves and hear nothing waiting for me. Some evenings I drove into Swords just to stand in a queue in a shop and hear people complain about parking.
The idea of opening the land did not come from kindness at first. It came from a woman called Aisling who stopped at my gate one Saturday morning with her little boy. He was maybe seven, wearing red wellies with one handle torn off. She asked if they could walk along the old lane at the top of my field because her son was learning about birds in school and had seen a kestrel hovering over the ditch. My first answer was no. I said it automatically. Liability, cattle, wet ground, all the usual words farmers use when they are really saying, “This is mine, and I am afraid.”
The boy looked past me, not rudely, just with the full attention children give to things adults forget are beautiful. The hawthorn was white with blossom that week. The lane was one my father had used to move cows before the new road cut the farm in two. No one had walked it in years except me and the foxes. Aisling apologised and turned to go, and I heard myself say, “Stay to the left of the ditch. Don’t go near the sheds.”
They were gone forty minutes. When they came back, the boy was holding a feather like it was a holy relic. He told me he had heard a skylark. I nearly corrected him because it was probably a wren, but I didn’t. Aisling thanked me in a way that embarrassed me. She said her husband had passed away the year before and the boy had been anxious in busy places. The parks were lovely, she said, but sometimes too full. She mentioned Phoenix Park and St Anne’s Park, places I knew only from passing talk, and said my old lane felt safe because there was space to breathe.
That night I stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the black shape of the fields. I thought of all the years I had guarded them from people who were not trying to take anything. They only wanted a half hour under a sky that had not been divided into appointments. The next Sunday I opened the gate from two to five. I wrote on a bit of plywood, “Community Walk. Stick to lane. Dogs on leads.” The sign looked foolish, but I nailed it up anyway.
Six people came the first week. Then fourteen. Then a retired nurse from Ballymun brought a flask and sat on the stone wall halfway up the lane. Two teenagers from Finglas walked without speaking, earphones in, but came back every Sunday. A man who said he worked in an office near the quays told me he had not touched a tree in months. A young mother cried quietly beside the old ash and pretended she had something in her eye. I learned not to ask too much. People will tell you what they can when the ground is steady under them.
There were problems, of course. One afternoon a dog slipped its lead and scattered the sheep. I shouted, properly shouted, the old temper rising in me. The owner, a young fella with tattoos up his neck, went white. He caught the dog and kept saying sorry.
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